Counterintuitively, scrambling X-rays can help scientists make better X-ray images.

New research from an international collaboration including Pierre Thibault (UCL Physics & Astronomy) uses the random speckles of scrambled X-rays to produce improved images of objects when X-rays are passed through them.

The location and brightness of the speckles encodes information about the object being studied, allowing a detailed image to be reconstructed.

Today’s Picture of the Week shows the intensity (shown as the height and colour) and position of X-ray speckles detected in an experiment that was carried out as part of this research.

Photo credit: I. Zanette (TUM). This photo may be freely reproduced for the purposes of news reporting of this research, but it is not released under a Creative Commons licence.